The Nobel Peace Prize 2026 – Recognition of All Survivors of International Crimes and Everyone Defending International Justice

By: Luisa Hofmann

For over 80 years, Courtroom 600 in Nuremberg has been a place of reckoning, remembrance and courage. It is where the world said ‘never again’ in the language of law, and where it first insisted that even the most powerful be held accountable for their crimes. The room has witnessed the worst of what human beings can do to one another, and it has heard the law answer back. Nuremberg is regarded as the birthplace of modern international criminal justice and has since stood as a symbol of the rule of law and the fight against impunity. Last Friday, 9 October 2026, the Nuremberg promise was honoured in the very room where it was first made, in a way no one had expected. The news filled Courtroom 600 with applause, laughter and a glimmer of hope.

The Nuremberg Forum 2026, titled ‘A Critical Alliance: The UN Charter and the Nuremberg Principles – Peace and Security in a Fragmented World’, brought together renowned academics and experts, distinguished practitioners, leading civil society representatives and enthusiastic students. They came to discuss lessons of the past, issues of the present and any future developments raised by the UN Charter and its interaction with international criminal law. Over three days, through panel discussions, keynote addresses and conversations over lunch in the Palace of Justice, participants explored how to strengthen the legal and institutional safeguards against the unlawful threat and use of force. They considered how our international justice system can adapt to uphold these principles in a world increasingly shaped by geopolitical fragmentation, democratic backsliding and hybrid warfare.

Yet even among some of the most enthusiastic and optimistic believers in international justice and the rule of law, the reality and gravity of our global situation felt omnipresent. The Charter’s prohibition on the use of force has repeatedly been violated in recent years, ongoing conflicts are at record levels, and rules are invoked selectively in ways that serve the most powerful, while for too many victims justice remains a distant dream. Undeniably, the international legal order is under tremendous pressure.

Against that backdrop, the last panel discussion was interrupted by a phone call from Oslo with the news that Navi Pillay, who was sitting among us, had been awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. What a wonderful gift and what an extraordinary affirmation of the work we had gathered to discuss. Almost instantly, Courtroom 600 filled with delight and defiance. Some were lost for words in disbelief, others cheered with joy, and colleagues who had been strangers two days earlier fell into each other’s arms. The laughter eventually erupted into a standing ovation.

Few people have done more than Navanethem ‘Navi’ Pillay to advance international law, human rights and peace. With exceptional courage and integrity, she has led the way towards a more comprehensive global legal order and helped turn the promise of accountability into a reality for victims of international crimes worldwide.

Her story begins in Durban, in apartheid South Africa, where a young woman born into a Tamil family in 1941 attended classes for non-white students that were funded by donations from her community. At the library, she found the transcripts of the Nuremberg trials and saw in them proof that nations could answer atrocity with law. She became a lawyer and, in 1967, the first woman to establish a law practice in her province of Natal. Defending anti-apartheid activists, she exposed the torture of political detainees and won access to lawyers for political prisoners, Nelson Mandela among them. She also taught at university and, working with the Women’s National Coalition, contributed to the inclusion of an equality clause in the Constitution banning discrimination based on race, gender, religion and sexual orientation. She co-founded the international women’s rights organisation Equality Now and has been active in groups addressing children’s rights, detainees, victims of torture and domestic violence, as well as economic, social and cultural rights. In 1995 she became the first woman of colour to sit on South Africa’s High Court.

That same year, the world called her to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where over eight years, including as its president, she helped shape the law significantly. She strongly influenced the tribunal’s groundbreaking jurisprudence recognising rape and sexual violence as both a crime against humanity and an act of genocide. She also played a crucial role in legal developments on freedom of speech and hate propaganda, as the tribunal brought the first charges of incitement to commit genocide based purely on propaganda. Women whose suffering was once dismissed as collateral damage found that the law could finally name it. Words that once seemed to float free of blood were tied to the violence they provoked.

On her remarkable journey she served as a judge at the International Criminal Court between 2003 and 2008 and subsequently held the UN mandate as High Commissioner for Human Rights, promoting equality, human rights, accountability and the protection of vulnerable populations. Until last year she chaired the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, which published its legal analysis of Israel’s conduct in Gaza under the Genocide Convention for the period from October 2023 to July 2025. She remains active in international law and human rights, most notably as a judge ad hoc at the International Court of Justice in the ongoing genocide proceedings in The Gambia v Myanmar.

Navi Pillay received the news as she has received most things in her life: with humour, humility and a quick turn towards others. ‘If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump,’ she joked, reeling with surprise and joy. At 85, she said, she had never expected to receive this prize. Dedicating the prize to all the survivors of international crimes as well as to everyone defending international justice, she remarked that perhaps it was meant to be that she was in this historic courtroom for this moment.

The timing was incredible. The Nuremberg judgment was delivered on 30 September and 1 October 1946, almost exactly eighty years before the prize found Navi Pillay in the same courtroom. In his opening statement to the tribunal, the American prosecutor Robert H. Jackson had declared that the crimes before it were so devastating that ‘civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.’ He also described the decision to submit defeated enemies to the judgment of law as one of the most significant tributes power had ever paid to reason. In December 1946, the UN General Assembly affirmed the principles recognised in the Nuremberg Charter and judgment, which helped lay the foundations of modern international criminal justice and its promise of accountability rather than impunity.

Navi Pillay's career has been a sustained effort to turn the promise of Nuremberg into practice. Her presence in Courtroom 600, eighty years after the Nuremberg judgment, brought that legacy full circle. The moment was a reminder that international justice is neither inevitable nor irreversible, but that brave and determined individuals can help make it real. Apartheid ended in Pillay’s lifetime, and when Mandela thanked the international anti-apartheid movement in 1990, his words were simple: ‘You chose to care.’ Navi Pillay did choose to care, as did countless others through decades of unglamorous work in courtrooms, commissions and classrooms. And so must we.

This prize will not end a single war or lift a single sanction. But it tells every survivor, prosecutor, judge, student and volunteer that their work matters. At a time when hope can be hard to sustain, that recognition is reason enough to keep fighting for human rights, justice and the rule of law.

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